Cul de Sac

From Lynne Murphy on Facebook, this Cul de Sac cartoon, which reminded her of her daughter Grover:

The child in the cartoon, Alice, is 4; she’s at the stage of bargaining about the exact choice of words.

The Bayloo puzzle

Over in Facebook, in the midst of a rambling discussion of dialect differences, Arne Adolfsen presented a phonological puzzle:

My sister-in-law who’s from here (the capital of Nowhere in northwestern Georgia) has a cat whose name she pronounces “Bayloo”, but when I call it that she has no idea what I’m talking about since the cat’s name is spelled “Betty Lou”. It’s really peculiar. My brother and I have to pronounce the name as three syllables with the TT (sounded like DD) in there or she and her sister and son have no idea that we mean the two-syllabled “Bayloo” they talk about.

Two issues here: where “Bayloo” (roughly [béylù], though the phonetic details will depend on fine details of Arne’s sister-in-law’s dialect) comes from; and why Arne’s sister-in-law doesn’t recognize his reproductions of her pronunciation (I’ll assume that his reproductions are close enough to accurate). The first question is easy; the second has a more complex, and much cooler, answer.

(Re)name that book

Back in September, Michael Erard approached his Facebook friends with this query:

The UK publisher that’s putting out Babel No More [: The Search for the World's Most Extraordinary Language Learners] doesn’t like the title, “Babel No More,” so they want to change it, and “Superlinguists” is their suggestion. This presents a slight problem, as science-of-language linguists (to whom I have more than a small allegiance) often resent the other sense of the word (a person who speaks many languages, often professionally) because it muddies laypeople’s perceptions of what they do. What do you think?

The technical term Michael uses in his book is hyperpolyglots. I gather that the UK publisher found the American title too opaque (fully comprehensible only through the subtitle) and balked at Hyperpolyglots because of its technicality. Michael’s friends gave advice that was all over the map.

As of this morning, no decision had been made. Michael gave them alternatives and was concerned that they would try to get Superlinguists into the business somehow.

Wuggiana

On Thomas Thurman’s Facebook page, passed on by Bert Vaux this morning, a linguistics cartoon:

The cartoon alludes to the Wug Test in psycholinguistics.

Alpacas on the march

It begins with this slogan/image, passed on to me on Facebook by Ruth Lawrence:

Though the reference of the term Alpacalypse isn’t clear here (in 18 days?), the term is very satisfying phonologically, whether seen as a portmanteau of alpaca and Apocalypse or as the suffixing of the libfix -alypse ’(terminal) disaster’ (historically from Apocalypse) to alpaca ‘species of camelid’; Apocalypse and alpacalypse are very close indeed.

Foreign language learning software

A friend wrote me a few days ago about Paul Pimsleur’s language-learning schemes, which were on sale; he said that this guy sold language-learning tapes. I pointed out that Pimsleur died in 1979, and that Simon and Schuster now ran the franchise. (This is no reflection on the software, which I haven’t checked out.)

Then there’s a Berlitz program, started by Maximilian B., who died in 1921, and continued in the family (eventually on-line) through his grandson Charles, who died in 2003.

And then there’s Rosetta Stone, an indomitable lady, who lives quietly in Arlington VA, close to the cosmopolitan and multilingual precincts of D.C. She teaches many languages, all over the world. And advertises relentlessly.

Family Circus

A comment from Tané Tachyon on my last Zippy posting, in which Family Circus figured prominently:

A couple years back I had The Best American Comics 2008 out from the library, and just loved Lynda Barry’s intro comic about what the Family Circus had meant to her when she was growing up.

So: some words about Lynda Barry and Family Circus, and about language in Bil Keane’s strip.

Eggcorn to portmanteau

From Benita Bendon Campbell, a link to a recent One Big Happy strip, in which a child’s eggcorn becomes a portmanteau:

Ruthie has eggcornishly reanalyzed periodical on the basis of her knowing the word pterodactyl. Corrected, she then hopes to treat her word periodactyl as a portmanteau of periodical and pterodactyl.

Me no likie?

Ann Burlingham wrote me on March 28th about an on-line argument about the expression me no likie, which she saw as racist (based on a stereotype of Asian English), but which others defended as childish language (as the sort of thing their 3-year-old niece says, and the like), some citing Urban Dictionary, which attributes the expression to the animated tv comedy The Family Guy. Other discussions cited Gullah [Sea Island Creole] and Jamaican Creole, and some writers saw me no likey X as an annoying webism:

Which demon-spawn, script-kiddie coined this baby-talk phrase, which I see plastered all over UBB systems every week? Who is he and what’s his address, because I’m going to beat him to death with a Nerf Bat. (link)

which brings us back to baby-talk.

This is a case in which everyone might be right, to some extent. We’re dealing with what we might think of as “imperfect English”, which can arise in several different contexts — child language acquisition, adult language learning, language contact — but can also deployed in intentional mockery of the English used in those contexts, either playfully or disparagingly.

Learning to talk (in)appropriately

Story from Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky about her 7-year-old daughter Opal (reported here with Opal’s permission):

She had carefully divided her library books into “read” and “unread”. I brought the book bag, which contained the unread book, in from the car. She woke up in the morning and demanded to know where her library books were, so I told her. She threw herself to the floor, sobbing, and said “But I had my heart set on reading my library books! I wanted Garfield as soon as I woke up!” I said, reasonably, “Then why don’t you get them out of the car?” She got up, bravely dried her tears, took a deep breath, looked me in the eye, and said “Then why don’t you give me the fuckin’ car keys?”